Urban Landscape + Lifestyle Photography

April 30, 2017

Violet Crown Cinema

Violet Crown Cinema, 2nd Street – Austin, Texas

The movie theaters have gotten nicer these days. They don’t match the grand architectural palaces of the golden age, before TV. But, I’m sure, to counter the readily available content from the Internet at a touch of a button, these movie houses needed to adapt. They are more like destinations, which you can enjoy with friends.

The Violet Crown, in downtown Austin, joins the other Austin bred Alamo Draft House, and has food and drinks during the movie. I’ve yet to watch a movie there, but they usually feature more independent and art house movies. The Alamo is a larger chain with may locations throughout the city.

The name, Violet Crown, was a nickname for Austin way back. It’s something I found out fairly recently, after seeing the reference in several places. Before the city was officially named Austin, it was a small settlement called Waterloo, which name also appears around town.

I’ve featured a lot of urban landscapes recently, which I took on a photowalk two weeks ago. I’ve talked a lot recently of maximizing dynamic range so I didn’t need to resort to HDR. This is another one of the studies, shot at 1/15 of a second, without a tripod.

I under exposed 1 2/3 stops to preserve the detail in the neon and movie posters and lifted the shadows in post. I could have made it even brighter, but opted to keep it somewhat dark to add mystery. The movie posters retain a good amount of color and detail, which in the past, I would need to do with layer blending, after creating my HDRs.

Overall, a worthwhile experiment with promising results. I’ll need to push the post processing to see where it breaks — throwing it increasingly challenging scenes.

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There are a couple of cinemas like that in Boston to which we used to go when we lived there. Now, of course, we have the 1950 drive in, which is set up to look and feel remarkably like the way it did when it opened. Not as classy as the fancier ones in the city, but interesting anyway. I’ll have to get there during the day and shoot some stuff. In fact, that’s a pretty good idea. Why didn’t I think of it before? Thanks!

We have two, locally. One is just OLD and dingy and probably going out of business soon. The other, though, has gone on the “retro” wagon and is doing very well. Garry thought it might make interesting pictures, too. All we need now is for it to stop raining for a little while.

Hi Mike, thanks for the feedback. I actually have all the exposure information on virtually every photo I post. However, unfortunately, you need a traditional computer, with a mouse to see it. — you can’t see it with a iPad or tablet.

If you do have a computer with mouse, hover over the image and a tooltip should appear that lists the camera, lens, and exposure information for that photo.

I’ll have to do more tests to see how much I can push the non-HDR post processing. I’ll try to write more about it, in the future.